KHH is Kimberly Hatch Harrison

I'm a former research biologist, and a former classroom teacher. Now I am the head writer and producer at Socratica - a company dedicated to making beautiful educational materials. Look for our videos on YouTube and our apps on the Google play store!

The Socratica Method Archives

Follow Socratica on Twitter

#LearnMore

100K

We’ve been working so hard on our YouTube channel, Socratica. We just reached an important milestone: 100,000 subscribers! At this point, you receive some recognition from YouTube, including an engraved silver play button plaque.

It’s the little one on the right.

Mostly we feel an enormous sense of relief that we’re on the right track. We spent a lot of time experimenting with our channel until we found what works. We have an enthusiastic audience who loves watching math and science videos. That’s what we’re good at, so that’s what we’ll keep making!

Here, we’d like to share with you a few of our lessons learned the hard way. Avoid our rookie mistakes!

1. FOCUS.

Your channel should have one very clear focus. We started out making all kinds of videos under the umbrella “education,” and that was way, way too broad. What’s worse, we even had videos with different languages, until we broke those off onto different channels, including Socratica Español and Socratica Português. It wasn’t until we decided we were going to focus on STEM videos that our channel started to grow more steadily.

2. DO YOUR RESEARCH.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t just for webpages. Before you make a video, go to Google Trends and see if people are even interested in the topic. Sometimes we use this as a tiebreaker if we’re trying to decide between several video topics. Once you’ve hit a million subscribers, maybe then you can relax and make any video you want. Until then, make sure there is an audience for what you’re making.

3. BE CONSISTENT.

Every time you stop production on your channel, it confuses and disappoints the YouTube algorithm. We used to go all in on very time-consuming videos, spending weeks at a time on very complicated animations (cough cough Black Holes video). Meanwhile, we weren’t publishing anything else on our channel.

We’re now making much more regular content that is simpler to produce: Abstract Algebra, Biology, Calculus, Chemistry, Python, Study Tips…You can expect to see at least one of these videos on our channel each week. We do still occasionally squeeze in one of those Astronomy videos that take a ton of time and effort. We love making those “tentpole” videos, but we have to plan for them, and make sure it doesn’t shut down our whole studio.

We set a very high bar for our content, and we’re sticking to it. But we’ve learned how to compromise where we can, in order to be more consistent. We hope these tips help you join us in the 100K club!